Ideas Are Free
How the Idea Revolution Is Liberating People and Transforming Organizations
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- USD 14.99
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- USD 14.99
Descripción editorial
The fact is, because they're the ones actually doing the day-to-day work front-line employees see a great many problems and opportunities that their managers don't. But most organizations do very poorly at tapping into this extraordinary potential source of revenue-enhancing, savings-generating ideas.
Ideas Are Free sets out a roadmap for totally integrating ideas and idea management into the way companies are structured and operate. Alan Robinson and Dean Schroeder draw on their ten years experience with more than three hundred organizations in fifteen countries to show precisely how to design a system to take advantage of this virtually free, perpetually renewing font of innovation.
Robinson and Schroeder deal with two fundamental principles of managing ideas that are highly counterintuitive - the importance of going after small ideas rather than big ones, and the problems with the most common reward schemes and how to avoid them. They describe how to make ideas part of everyone's job, and how to set up and run an effective process for handling ideas-how to take a good idea system and make it great. And they show how good idea systems have a profound impact on an organization's culture. At the end of each chapter they provide "Guerrilla Tactics for the Idea Revolutionary", actions to promote ideas that any manager can take on his or her own authority, and that require little or no resources.
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Firms that take ideas seriously take their employees' thinking seriously, and employees who think are employees who are alive. Thus argue Robinson and Schroeder, management academics and corporate creativity consultants. Ideas are the life force of corporations, they say, and managers who recognize this can increase profits and avoid budget cuts and layoffs. Kill employee ideas and what you have is a carcass of a company, a firm mired in bureaucracy and rote processes with a staff of dulled zombies. But ideas are just the tip of the iceberg. The key to a successful company, argue Robinson and Schroeder, is encouraging a corporate culture that swiftly recognizes and implements improvements. With that in mind, the authors focus on ideas as the catalyst of corporate change rather than the end itself. This book is thoroughly researched, with convincing facts and data (Toyota's success, they say, is the result of an idea culture that takes one million ideas per year from its employees). It also lays out a blueprint for a corporate idea program from inspiration to implementation, along with some unexpected caveats (e.g., rewarding ideas tends to stifle them as people focus on the award rather than on the idea, and small ideas--leading to continuous, incremental improvement--are more valuable than large ones). For any manager interested in jolting a moribund workforce out of complacency, this is a clever, pragmatic guide to awakening both the front line and the bottom line.